Lovis Corinth

The present work depicts the Walchensee, a lake in the small mountain village of Urfeld in Upper Bavaria. Corinth had first visited this site with his family in 1918, and he was so enthusiastic about the landscape that his wife Charlotte Corinth had a house built for him the following year on a hillside overlooking the lake. "To prevent the possibility of our splendid view of the Walchensee being spoiled by new houses built by neighbours," Charlotte recalled several years later, "we also purchased a meadow lying just below our own house. On one side of it, there was a larch tree. Corinth loved this gnarled old tree. He used to sit on a bench underneath it for hours on end, lost in contemplation of the lake and the mountains" (quoted in Lovis Corinth (exhibition catalogue), Haus der Kunst, Munich; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; St. Louis Art Museum and Tate Gallery, London, 1996-97, p. 249). This site was a hallowed subject of German Romantic painting, and Corinth enthusiastically reinterpreted it with the aesthetic sensibilities of an Expressionist painter. From 1918 until his death in 1925, Corinth completed almost 80 pictures of the lakeside panorama (figs. 1 & 2), never tiring of the majestic vista that lay right outside of his villa. Walchensee, Morgennebel, painted in 1924, is a stunning example of how the artist, in the mid-seventies and in the final months of his life, was able to synthesise the visual grandeur of the landscape and his emotional response to it.

For this painting, Corinth depicts the lake and the Alpine horizon at dawn, probably around 5 o’clock, according to Charlotte Berend-Corinth. The Karnwendel mountains can be seen on the opposite banks of the river along the left margin of the picture, while the Alps, painted with horizontal strokes of plum and violet, appear in the far distance. In the centre of the composition is the Hotel Fischer am See, with its rust-coloured roof and sloping eaves, distinguishable through the branches of the larch trees. These geographical markers are features of almost all the Walchensee pictures, as this was the view that Corinth contemplated every day from his terrace. But as the seasons changed and the time of day cast a new light over the landscape, the artist would re-examine this scene in his paintings with a fresh, stylistic approach and renewed vigour.

By the time he completed this work in 1924, Corinth was suffering from a degenerative illness and had lost all ability to use his right hand. Rather than stop painting, Corinth had taught himself to paint with his left hand years earlier. This infirmity and its challenges reignited the artist’s creative drive, and the works that he completed in his last years demonstrate a new found bravura in his approach to painting. Freer and more dramatic in their brushwork and tonality, more generous in their impasto and far more visually engaging than the comparatively subdued landscapes of his earlier years, the Walchensee pictures are considered among the most accomplished and stylistically complex compositions of Corinth’s œuvre.

Fig. 1, Lovis Corinth, Walchenseelandschaft mit Lärche, 1920, oil on canvas, Kunsthalle, Mannheim
Fig. 2, Lovis Corinth, Walchenseelandschaft, 1922, oil on canvas, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt